For those who have not been exposed to the clever marketing strategery behind Girl Scout Cookies, it basically goes like this: About this time every year, thousands of young girls sell boxes of cookies on heavily-trafficked street corners for fundraising. The cookies are only moderately tasty. The girls are of course much too young to be interesting to even a dirty old man such as myself (although they are often accompanied by mothers who are). The trick is that the cookies only have limited availability -- not only are they only sold a few weeks in each year, but the scouts also seem to have this uncanny ability to disappear from street corners exactly when you want to buy a box.

Being denied something repeatedly, of course, means that I crave it even more. The box of Thin Mints than I bought at lunchtime is almost gone. I blame my officemates.

I need encouragement to work on a bunch of various projects. People tell me that liboil is cool and that everyone should use it. I'd like to pretend it's not vaporware, but realistically, it is. I've got the oven; throw some mud my way, and I'll make bricks.

On
20 Jan, I predicted that it would take me a few weeks to fix my car. I should have predicted 1 month, since it was exactly one month when I finally replaced the alternator on Friday. I also readjusted the rear brakes, an evil necessary every few thousand miles on my car.

My poor car -- the alternator is broken, so if I want to drive anywhere, I have to fully charge the battery and drive really fast before the battery runs out. It's not too bad during the day, but racing around at night with the headlights operating on 9 volts (and decreasing) brings new meaning to "fun". Being inherintly lazy, and only driving my car about twice a month, I'm sure I will procrastinate buying an alternator for another few weeks.

The car comes up, because I used it this weekend to go to the neighborhood BestBuy and purchase a new laptop, an eMachines M5312. Except the ethernet tranceiver didn't work, so I had to return it. I drove to a different store to return it, since the first sold me the last in stock. And then drove to a third, because the second sold their last about 10 minutes before I got there. The car survived.

I, however, was very hungry and went to get a burrito before wiping Windows XP Home Edition.

Being a long-time Debian fan and developer, I decided to test out the new sarge installer. I was very impressed. It was essentially bug free, only confusing in a few places, and installed lots of stuff without any problems.

Well, there was one problem, but nothing that is debian-installer fault -- I needed to install XFree-4.3 to get X working.

What is bothering me currently, though, is that the installer didn't really attempt to get any of my other hardwhere working (or tell me that it couldn't get it working). I have USB, Firewire, wireless, ACPI, and sound that were all left unsupported and the relevant packages uninstalled. I'm now piecing together what exactly is necessary to get these working -- at least for wireless, I can apparently use the NDIS driver and driverloader.

Every once in a while, I think of a potential project to work on and think, "Huh. That looks easy. If it were really that easy, someone would have written it by now." swfdec was one such projects. librfb (and a corresponding GStreamer plugin rfbsrc) is my latest. Eight hours later, I run 'gst-launch-0.7 rfbsrc ! ximagesink', and get a hack that is essentially equivalent to xvncviewer. Give or take a few features. RFB (remote framebuffer) is the name of the protocol that VNC uses.

Anyone who follows GStreamer knows that I merged a rewrite of an entire subsystem on 23 December and then disappeared for 5 days. I didn't intend to disappear for 5 days, it's just that my parents don't have a decent network connection.

So aside from major subsystem rewrites, GStreamer seems to be settling down quite nicely. We have a lot of new infrastructure since 0.6, and now we get to update all the plugins to fully utilize the new possibilities. Hopefully we'll get everything filled out, including the documentation in time to surpass everyone's expectations in March. Also, why is it that just when we need to do an API freeze, I keep thinking of API changes that need to be made?

About a month ago, I made a comment that we needed a few more GStreamer hackers. Interestingly, in the last month, a number of new people have been hanging out on IRC and writing code, which is encouraging. Is it just me, or when new regulars show up on IRC, it feels like they've been there forever, just kinda quiet?

The real reason I'm posting a new entry so I can see the head that was apparently assigned to me by thomasvs.